Dear Commons Community,

The Nobel Peace Prize on Friday was awarded to a Yazidi former captive of the Islamic State group and a Congolese doctor for their work to highlight and eliminate the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.  As reported by various media.

Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege “have made a crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its announcement.  “Nadia Murad is the witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated against herself and others. Denis Mukwege has devoted his life to haelping and defending women like Nadia.

Murad is one of an estimated 3,000 Yazidi girls and women who were victims of rape and other abuses by the IS army. She managed to escape after three months and chose to speak about her experiences. At the age of 23, she was named the U.N.’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.

Mukwege has treated thousands of women in Congo, many of whom were victims of gang rape. Armed men tried to kill him in 2012, forcing him to temporarily leave the country.

Other Nobel prizes awarded this year were:

Dear Commons Community,

Today the Senate will be voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh or not for a seat on the Supreme Court.  Four senators were still undecided — Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and the Republicans Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Regardless of how the vote goes, it is clear that the confirmation process was a “national disgrace.”  David Brooks in his New York Times column this morning examines how Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings have become “America’s nadir” and that they represent “the complete tribalization of national life”.  Below is his entire column.

A most sad commentary on America!

Tony

———————————————————————

A Complete National Disgrace

The Kavanaugh hearings as American nadir.

by David Brooks

Over the past few years, hundreds of organizations and thousands of people (myself included) have mobilized to reduce political polarization, encourage civil dialogue and heal national divisions.

The first test case for our movement was the Kavanaugh hearings. It’s clear that at least so far our work is a complete failure. Sixty-nine percent of Americans in one poll called the hearings a “national disgrace,” and the only shocking thing is that there are 31 percent who don’t agree.

What we saw in these hearings was the unvarnished tribalization of national life. At the heart of the hearings were two dueling narratives, one from Christine Blasey Ford and one from Brett Kavanaugh. These narratives were about what did or did not happen at a party 36 years ago. There was nothing particularly ideological about the narratives, nothing that touched on capitalism, immigration or any of the other great disputes of national life.

And yet reactions to the narratives have been determined almost entirely by partisan affiliation. Among the commentators I’ve seen and read, those who support Democrats embrace Blasey’s narrative and dismissed Kavanaugh’s. Those who support Republicans side with Kavanaugh’s narrative and see holes in Ford’s. I can think of few exceptions

These hearings were also a devastating blow to intellectual humility. At the heart of this case is a mystery: What happened at that party 36 years ago? There is no corroborating evidence either way. So the crucial questions are: How do we sit with this uncertainty? How do we weigh the two contradictory testimonies? How do we measure these testimonies when all of cognitive science tells us that human beings are really bad at spotting falsehood? Should a person’s adult life be defined by something he did in high school?

Commentators and others may have acknowledged uncertainty on these questions for about 2.5 seconds, but then they took sides. If they couldn’t take sides based on the original evidence, they found new reasons to confirm their previous positions. Kavanaugh is too angry and dishonest. He drank beer and threw ice while in college. With tribal warfare all around, uncertainty is the one state you are not permitted to be in.

This, of course, led to an upsurge in base mobilization. Persuasion is no longer an important part of public conversation. Public statements are meant to mobilize your mob. Senator Cory Booker can’t just sort through the evidence. He has to get Spartacus-like histrionic in order to whip Democrats toward his presidential candidacy. Kavanaugh can’t just dispassionately try to disprove the allegations made against him. Instead, he gets furious and stokes up culture war rage in order to fire up the Republican base.

This leads to an epidemic of bigotry. Bigotry involves creating a stereotype about a disfavored group and then applying that stereotype to an individual you’ve never met. It was bigotry against Jews that got Alfred Dreyfus convicted in 1894. It was bigotry against young black males that got the Central Park Five convicted in 1990. It was bigotry against preppy lacrosse players that led to the bogus Duke lacrosse scandal.

This past month we’ve seen thousands of people convinced that they know how Kavanaugh behaved because they know how “privileged” people behave. We’ve seen thousands of people lining up behind Kavanaugh because they know that there’s this vicious thing called “the Left,” which hates them.

This is a complete pulverization of the actual individuals involved in this case — a retreat from complex particularity to simplistic group prejudice.

The core problem behind all of this is a complete breakdown in the legitimacy of our public institutions. The Supreme Court is no longer a place where justices dispassionately rule on the Constitution. It’s a place where they cast predictable party-line votes. Therefore, senators no longer deliberate on nominees. They cast predictable party-line votes. The members of the public no longer reason with one another. They fall into predictable party-line formation and then invent post-hoc, bad-faith rationalizations to give cover to their ideologically driven positions (Drank too much! Bad temperament! Bad yearbook entry!).

It’s clear that we need a new sort of environmental movement, a movement to police our civic environment. That environment isn’t polluted by a vague condition called “polarization.” It is polluted by the specific toxic emissions we all produce in our low moments. Those emissions have to be precisely identified, classified, called out as shameful.

It’s also clear we have to set up more forums for personal encounters between different kinds of people. You detoxify disputes when you personalize them. People who don’t have regular contact with people they disagree with become intellectually dishonest quickly.

Finally, the good trends have to be fenced off from poisonous politics. American society is taking concrete action to make sexual assault intolerable. But this movement will not succeed if it becomes a pinball in the partisan politics of personal destruction.

The Kavanaugh hearings were a look in the mirror, and a vivid display of how ugly things have become. What are we going to do about it?

Dear Commons Community,

Leon Lederman, whose ingenious experiments with particle accelerators deepened science’s understanding of the subatomic world, died early yesterday in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96.

Dr. Lederman and two colleagues demonstrated that there are at least two kinds of particles called neutrinos (there are now known to be three), a discovery that was honored in 1988 with a Nobel Prize in Physics. He went on to lead a team at the Fermi laboratory, in Batavia, Ill., that found the bottom quark, another fundamental constituent of matter.

For those baffled by such esoterica, Dr. Lederman was quick to sympathize.

“ ‘The Two Neutrinos’ sounds like an Italian dance team,” he remarked in his Nobel banquet speech. 

Here is an excerpt from his obituary that appears this morning in the New York Times:

Leon Max Lederman was born on July 15, 1922, in Manhattan, where his parents, Morris and Minna (Rosenberg) Lederman, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a laundry business. Leon grew up in the Bronx and graduated from James Monroe High School in 1939 and from City College of New York in 1943. His bachelor’s degree was in chemistry, but by then he was already finding himself drawn to physics.

After serving in France during World War II with the Army Signal Corps, he entered the graduate school of physics at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951. He was soon working at the school’s new particle accelerator, just up the Hudson River at the Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, N.Y.

It was there in 1957 that he performed his first eye-catching experiment. Two theorists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang (who shared the Nobel Prize that year), had speculated, amid widespread skepticism, that the weak nuclear force, which is involved in radioactive decay, might violate a law of physics called conservation of parity.

This idea is sometimes explained metaphorically with the example of a mechanical clock. Built in its mirror image — with the gears turning counterclockwise instead of clockwise and the numerals on the face reversed — it would still indicate the proper time.

When it comes to left or right and clockwise or counterclockwise, the law of conservation of parity holds that the universe doesn’t care one way or the other. Physicists had widely assumed that this equivalence held true for all the forces of nature, whether at the scale of galaxies or on the subatomic realm.

During a regular Friday lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Columbia, Dr. Lee told Dr. Lederman and some other associates that the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu had just completed an experiment that appeared to show that the weak force, unlike the others, indeed violated parity. During the decay of a nuclear isotope, gamma rays were more likely to be emitted in one direction than the other.

After heading upriver that evening to the Nevis Laboratories, Dr. Lederman and Richard Garwin, along with a graduate student, Marcel Weinrich, worked through the weekend and confirmed Dr. Wu’s discovery using a different experimental approach.

That clinched the deal, and the violation of parity caused a sensation. An exception had been found to a fundamental physical law. The universe was stranger than it seemed.

Dr. Lederman recalled the thrill of finding a new phenomenon in an interview in 1981 with the Times science writer Malcolm W. Browne in Discover magazine. “The best discoveries always seem to be made in the small hours of the morning, when most people are asleep, where there are no disturbances and the mind becomes most contemplative,” he said.

“You’re out in a lonely spot somewhere, looking at the numbers on reams of paper spewing out of a computer,” he continued. “You look and look, and suddenly you see some numbers that aren’t like the rest — a spike in the data.

I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Lederman twice in the 1990s while working on a grant to encourage minority students to consider teaching as a career.  He was a joyful man with keen insight into physics as well as life.  He would tell stories of growing up in the Bronx and going to public schools. 

May he rest in peace.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The news media today will be dissecting as much as possible the conclusion of the FBI investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  The FBI sent its report to the White House last night which in turn sent it to the Senate.   

The information “is the last addition to the most comprehensive review of a Supreme Court nominee in history, which includes extensive hearings, multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half million pages of documents,” White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah said on Twitter. “With this additional information, the White House is fully confident the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.”

The FBI reportedly wasn’t able to corroborate the allegations of sexual misconduct, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. According to The New York Times, the bureau ended up reaching out to 10 people and interviewing nine of them. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) yesterday called for a Friday vote ― before the findings were even released ― to end debate on the Kavanaugh issue, with a final vote on his nomination as early as Saturday. The Senate Judiciary Committee will review the FBI’s findings today.

Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) claimed Wednesday that there was never once a “whiff” of sexual misconduct unearthed in the investigation or any previous FBI probe carried out on Kavanaugh since 1993. Democrats attacked the statement as false, furthering the partisan back-and-forth that has swirled since three women came forward with allegations against the judge. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the claims.

It’s likely that Republicans will largely vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination, although Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) said they haven’t yet made up their minds.

This saga may be coming to an end!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Amazon announced yesterday that it will pay all of its U.S. employees a minimum of $15. an hour, more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25.  In making the announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the new rate will go into effect on Nov. 1, covering all of its full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal employees in the U.S.  As reported by NPR:

“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” said Bezos, as the company announced the new pay scale Tuesday. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.”

In addition to committing to higher minimum pay, Amazon says it will push Washington, D.C., policymakers for a higher federal minimum wage.

Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, told NPR that the company believes $7.25 is too low for a federal minimum wage, though it’s not specifically advocating for $15.

“We think it’s up to Congress and the experts to decide what it should be,” he said. “But we think it should be higher.”

Clark said Amazon’s current hourly pay for temporary warehouse workers varies by region, from just under $11 to more than $15.

In another change, Amazon will phase out its Restricted Stock Unit program for order fulfillment and customer service employees who are paid hourly. Those workers currently receive shares of stock if they meet certain conditions. But the company says the employees have said, “They prefer the predictability and immediacy of cash to RSUs.”

For those hourly workers, Amazon plans to replace its RSU grant program with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of 2019. The net effect, the company says, will mean “significantly more total compensation” for the workers.

At the new pay rate, an Amazon employee who makes the new minimum wage would need to work more than three weeks (133 hours) to buy one share of the company’s stock, which currently sits above $2,000. And that’s before taxes and other expenses are taken into account.

The corporation revealed its median pay this past spring, under a new law that requires companies to report the earnings gap between their CEOs and their regular workers. As Bloomberg News reported in April, “Amazon is now the second-largest private employer in the U.S. behind Walmart Inc.”

After the $28,446 figure drew criticism from Sen. Bernie Sanders and others, Amazon stressed that the number reflects its employees’ pay worldwide; the median salary for a full-time employee in the U.S., the company said, is $34,123 — a figure it said should be compared to salaries at other retailers.

Amazon’s market capitalization currently stands near $1 trillion; it paid Bezos, its founder and CEO, $1.68 million last year. But as Amazon’s stock has risen, so has Bezos’ net worth — it’s currently estimated around $165 billion.

Those gains came in the same year that a number of Amazon’s employees were found to be relying on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP — which until recently was commonly called food stamps. That revelation came from The Intercept, which reported that in four out of the five states that provided data, Amazon was one of the top employers of SNAP recipients.

Sanders called the move “an important step forward.”

“Our view was that it is totally absurd for the taxpayers of this country to have to subsidize the wealthiest guy on Earth who is paying his employees wages that are so low that many of them are forced to go on Medicaid, food stamps, and other government programs. They denied that, they argued with us,” the Vermont senator told NPR on Tuesday. “But at the end of the day what I have to say is, I have to give credit where credit is due. And that is that Mr. Bezos today did the right thing.”

Sanders predicted that other companies including Wal-Mart and McDonald’s would follow suit by raising wages.

But David Autor, a professor and labor economist at MIT, tells NPR he thinks it’s too early to declare victory on that front.

“I think it will increase pressure on other large employers to take similar steps,” Autor said. He adds that the wage hike won’t be “the domino that knocked over the entire rack of dominoes.”

Nonetheless, he said, “No matter how cynically one wants to interpret it, it’s still good news.”

“It will be felt by the individuals who receive it,” Autor said. “It will increase their standards of living allow them to pay for transportation, for food, for housing, for education and stuff for their kids. Low-wage workers in America are low-paid by the standards of high income developed countries.”

The new minimum wage for Amazon workers far exceeds the $7.25 federal minimum pay; Amazon says it will set the mark for more than 250,000 current employees, as well as more than 100,000 seasonal employees it plans to hire for the coming holiday season.

The federally mandated minimum pay hasn’t risen since 2009. And in that time, the rate “has lost about 9.6 percent of its purchasing power to inflation,” the Pew Research Center said last year.

From state to state, the minimum wage varies widely. In 29 states and Washington, D.C., it’s higher than the federal rate. But in two states (Georgia and Wyoming), it’s lower, at $5.15. And five states have laws that don’t require a minimum wage at all, according to the Department of Labor.

Amazon’s new pay rate includes workers who are hired through temp agencies and subsidiaries in the U.S. The company has more than 575,000 employees worldwide.”

Congratulations to Amazon and Mr. Bezos!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.  As reported:

”The Times’s investigation is based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, that reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

The president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for this article. But a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings. “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate…

…The Times’s findings raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his income tax returns, breaking with decades of practice by past presidents. According to tax experts, it is unlikely that Mr. Trump would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution for helping his parents evade taxes, because the acts happened too long ago and are past the statute of limitations. There is no time limit, however, on civil fines for tax fraud.”

The New York State Tax Department said that it was probing the allegations laid out in the Times report.

The article is quite lenghty and filled with financial transactions and details.  It is worth a read.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the Census Bureau, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard and Brown, published nationwide data that will make it possible to pinpoint — down to the census tract, a level relevant to individual families — where children of all backgrounds have the best shot at getting ahead.  The new study entitled,   The Opportunity Atlas Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility (October 2018) by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, & Nathaniel Hendren (Opportunity Insights) Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter (U.S. Census Bureau) provides a treasure trove of data on the impact of neighborhoods on social mobility.  Here is an excerpt from the executive summary.

“Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chances of climbing the income ladder? To answer this question, we construct the Opportunity Atlas, a freely available interactive mapping tool that traces the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. Using the Atlas, you can see exactly where and for whom opportunity is lacking in your community and develop customized solutions to improve children’s outcomes. The Opportunity Atlas is built using anonymized data on 20 million Americans who are in their mid-thirties today. We map these individuals back to the Census tract (geographic units consisting of about 4,200 people) in which they grew up. Then, for each of the 70,000 tracts in America, we estimate children’s average earnings, incarceration rates, and other outcomes by their parental income level, race, and gender. The new data yield several insights into how neighborhoods shape children’s trajectories.

Finding 1: Children’s outcomes in adulthood vary sharply across neighborhoods that are just a mile or two apart.

Finding 2: Places that have good outcomes for one racial group do not always have good outcomes for others.

Finding 3: Moving to a better neighborhood earlier in childhood can increase a child’s income by several thousand dollars Children who move to high-upward.

Finding 4: Traditional indicators of local economic success such as job growth do not always translate into greater upward mobility.

Finding 5: Historical data on children’s outcomes are a useful predictor of children’s prospects for upward mobility today.

Finding 6: The new data uncover “opportunity bargains” – affordable neighborhoods that produce good outcomes for children.”

Raj Chetty and his colleagues have made an incredible contribution to our understanding of social mobility.  The graphics above and below come from the study’s website.

Well-done!

Tony

https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethWarren/videos/294502111157158/?__xts__[0]=68.ARBQ12djUCXm1NJVytJjwHEnEYCpzebwlw-FtAIpW4FFwoJXghnZA4yQmzUGBs6qYYAHEKkqzf871rBtypNPiJ-U8tFf5uAZkd4jl_P76Bblpz_wtTgvoDn6B-kAZi4UOdi_RbVS3-sltQsdgysL-HnRYmoLIX9Kt9ToedXn0IJ-I9NudIbK&__tn__=-R

Dear Commons Community,

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren will consider running for president after the coming mid-term elections. As reported by various media:

“Elizabeth Warren announced on Saturday that she will seriously consider running for the White House following the midterm elections in November.

“It’s time for women to go to Washington and fix our broken government and that includes a woman at the top. So here’s what I promise, after November 6 I will take a hard look at running for president,” she declared to a standing ovation as seen in an online video.

Warren, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump who has said he intends to seek re-election, shared her plans at a town hall meeting in western Massachusetts. She expressed concern about the nation’s general state of affairs and in particular decried Republicans’ handling of sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

“I watched 11 men who were too chicken to ask a woman a single question,” she said of the GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who relied on outside attorney to question Kavanaugh’s alleged victim, Christine Blasey Ford, at a hearing on Thursday. “I watched powerful men helping a powerful man make it to an even more powerful position.”

Of the president, Warren said, “Let’s face it, Donald Trump is taking this country in the wrong direction … I am worried, down to my bones, about what Donald Trump is doing to our democracy.”

Speculation over a presidential bid by Warren has swirled for some time. Her Saturday remarks were her clearest and most direct on her intentions.

Warren, an Oklahoma native, won her Senate seat in 2012 after careers as a law professor and consumer advocate. She is currently seeking re-election to the Senate, and is heavily favored to defeat state Rep. Geoff Diehl.”

Run, Elizabeth, Run!

Tony